COVID-19 Community Levels is a tool to help communities decide what prevention steps to take based on the latest data.

According to the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Levels, we have one medium level county Pinal.

Low level counties are Apache, Clark, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Santa Cruz, Washington, Yavapai, and Yuma.

At all levels including the low level, prevention steps include:

• Stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines

• Get tested if you have symptoms

At the medium level, if you are at high risk for severe illness, talk to your healthcare provider about whether you need to wear a mask and take other precautions.

At the high level, wear a mask indoors in public. Additional precautions may be needed for people at high risk for severe illness.

Levels can be low, medium, or high and are determined by looking at hospital beds being used, hospital admissions, and the total number of new COVID-19 cases in an area.

State of the virus

Update for April 14

• Coronavirus cases have begun to rise again in the United States after a precipitous fall from their January peak.

• Rising cases on the East Coast have driven much of the country’s increase. Cases have more than doubled since the start of the month in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., and the prevalence of home tests, which often go unreported in official tallies, suggests that the true volume of cases may be far higher.

• Experts believe that two new subvariantsmay be contributing to this growth. Both evolved from the BA.2 subvariant, which is already responsible for a majority of cases in the Northeast.

• New case reports have also begun to increase in other regions, particularly the Midwest. In Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, cases are up by more than 40 percent in the past two weeks.

• Still, the number of new cases announced per day nationwide remains at its lowest level since the summer of 2021.

• Hospitalizations also remain low. On average, fewer than 15,000 people are in American hospitals with the coronavirus each day — a figure comparable only to the earliest weeks of the pandemic.

• Deaths in the pandemic, which are expected to reach 1 million in the United States in the coming weeks, continue to decline. Around 500 coronavirus deaths are currently being reported each day, a decrease of more than 25 percent since the end of March.